ABOUT THIS BOOK

The poems in Reunion insistently turn back toward sources: toward home and the idea of home, toward the body, and toward objects that return us to ourselves. They always surprise, moving from quantum mechanics, wildflowers, and a Bobcat driver to a woman killed by a flying deer, magma becoming rock, and an invasion of flying ants. Fleda Brown deftly unites daily frustrations and suffering with profound psychological, physical, and cosmic questions.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Fleda Brown is Poet Laureate of Delaware, professor of English at the University of Delaware, and author of Breathing In, Breathing Out, winner of the Philip Levine Prize, and The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives. Her poetry has been published in journals including Poetry, Kenyon Review, AmericanPoetry Review, and Georgia Review. This is her sixth collection of poems.

REVIEWS

"From rigorously formalist to prose-poetic, these poems, with their invariably eloquent details, are lessons in sharp observation and what it is to be a woman with a grand heart, a penetrating mind, and not least, a keen wit."—Sydney Lea, author of Ghost Pain

"The neighborly language of local exchange and local enchantment, slipknot and memory, cell-stream and the surgeon's knife, runs like springwater through the poems of Fleda Brown. So perfectly tempered are the apprehensions of metaphor, so cunning are the felicities of form—rhyming as natural as human breath!—we're tempted to think it's not art at all. Except for the radiance, which only art, and a generous mind, can make."—Linda Gregerson

"Things fall apart in these poems—memories, family, and the expanding universe are scattered into pieces, spread across imagination's space. But Brown also seeks to compose—or at least to imply the possibility of—their reunion. Cast in an impressive variety of forms, she manages her signature, magical metamorphoses, poetry soaring at its best, yet, somehow, never leaving the ground it rises from."—Dabney Stuart

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Acknowledgments			000
I
Canada Anemone		000
I Return to Fayetteville after Twenty Years		000
What It Was Like		000
Biology Lesson		000
Fayetteville Junior High		000
Elegy for Donna		000
The Explanation		000
Knot Tying Lessons: The Slip Knot		000
Makeup Regimen		000
Delaware		000
The Death of Cleone		000
II
Trillium		000
If Names Started Coming Loose		000
Small Boys Fishing under the Bridge		000
Light		000
Red Paint		000
Poverty of Spirit		000
Ode to the Buffman Brothers		000
Knot Tying Lessons: The Clove Hitch		000
Flying Ants		000
For My Daughter's Fortieth Birthday		000
The Moon Is Moving Away		000
No Heron		000
Knot Tying Lessons: The Perfection Knot			000
III
Bladder Campion		000
Perspective Map		000
Mouse		000
Birthday		000
Twelfth Wedding Anniversary Poem		000
Wild Lily of the Valley		000
Rubbing Feet		000
Reading Poetry at the Horse Meadow Senior Center		000
Elegy for a Woman Killed on New London Road by a Flying Deer		000
The Student		000
The Girl Thit Got Struck with Lightning		000
Indian River Inlet, I		000
For Bill, Injured in Final Dress Rehearsal		000
Lady's Slipper		000
Oppressions		000
Through Security		000
Walker		000
Indian River Inlet, II		000
IV
Jack in the Pulpit		000
Knife		000
On a Marble Relief Sculpture of an Unknown Boy, 1865		000
Bridal Veil Falls		000

EXCERPT

“Herons are bigger than egrets, though they have the same long legs. My father said one with an eight-foot wingspan flew over his boat. I would like to be shadowed by something that big. It would seem like poetry, just out of reach, moving and making a bare flush of wings, and I would think of it long after, the way it was heading away from me. My longing would not be satisfied even if I could grab its scrawny legs in my hand, even if it nuzzled up to me.” —excerpt from No Heron © The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

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